Accepting my failings

Lesson 3: scared to cut

Bank Holiday Monday. A good night’s sleep and I’m up, energised and ready to go…the boys (son, husband, cats (all 3), stepson) sleep on… I drink tea, I drink more tea and fantasize about what I will do today what wonderful things I will create with my sewing machine.

Except to create you need materials…mine live in my stepson’s room – as do most of my clothes…my stepson sleeps…and sleeps…and sleeps…and eventually awakes at 12pm complaining that he is tired and that he didn’t get to sleep until 4am…hmmm could that be anything to do with going to bed at 3.50am ?

So yes lesson 3 was examining my “not worthy of the name” stash and trying to find something I could use to make a bag…and deciding that I didn’t want to use any of it.

You see I don’t have a stash. I have some material, all of which has been bought with a plan in mind, none of which have been used due to my inability to cut things out and a fear of messing something expensive up (not that any of it is expensive, just that they are all invested with ambition).

Added to this is my aim this year to not bring anything new into the house until I have found a home for everything that is already here (ok so my trip to John Lewis, high Wycombe on the way home this evening may take some explaining unless I use it all quickly…) means that it may be difficult to find something to make a bag out of…a bag that I don’t particularly want…

This is the catch. I need to make the bag because it is something easy to learn from. But, I have problems psychologically making something just for the sheer hell of it…there has to be an aim, it has to be made for a reason (sorry, it’s this pragmatic sensible streak I cannot escape from ) and quite frankly I do not have a need for this bag, and I think I need to make a mock up first (because of my inability to cut things out). Smaller versions I can see being used as “wrapping paper”…I already have a vague plan for next christmas involving bath bombs, slippers, night masks etc etc.

So I have even less need of a mock up bag of a bag I don’t need in the first place and no material I feel happy sacrificing to make it. Not of the things I call stash, not even the material I have salvaged from old clothes is suitable…however, most of my bed linen is over 20 years old…and I am just in the process of decorating the bedroom…and I’m almost 40 and I’ve never had co ordinating bed linen…so, maybe I could make something which is not intended to have a life outside of my dining room ?

Which is a long way of saying that Lesson 3 was getting to know my stash (there are about 4-5 pages describing fabric in the encyclopedia) but that I wasn’t procrastinating – although if I don’t have a mock up bag to show you by sunday then yes I am a 100% carat scaredy cat.

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2 thoughts on “Lesson 3: scared to cut”

One of my (and I hate to say the words) new year resolutions (which of course I am absolutely not really having new year resolutions, this just happens to be an aim I happened to think of around the New Year) is to actually use the craft books I buy, every single one of them but my problem is that some of them just don’t have anything in them I’d actually use even if the book is really pretty (the curse of buying craft books over the internet), so my aim this year is to start making my Christmas presents for 2011 now (as I hope by next Christmas things may have looked up a bit on the work front, so by then I may not have time) and if I’m making something from a craft book that I wouldn’t actually use myself, that is going to go in my pile of presents to give next Christmas. So maybe make the bag but save it to give as a gift later on in the year?